Seems to me that new versions are taking longer to get into Sid these days.
Some examples.

After squeeze came out and the freeze ended it took almost three months to get the new version of Digikam.

There is a bug in liblcms 1.18 which makes it unusable (at least on 64-bit). It was fixed upstream with the release of version 1.19 in January 2010. A year and a half later and it's still not in Sid.

Spamassassin 3.3.1 has been unusable since Perl 5.12 came out in May. Upstream released version 3.3.2 more than three weeks ago. It hit the Fedora 14 repos the next day. Still unavailable in Sid.

Maybe I just happened to run into some exceptions, but I've had the feeling that over the past year the pace has slowed down. Has anyone else noticed this?

DonKult

Post subject: Re: Has Debian slowed down? Posted: 12.07.2011, 23:39

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hightime wrote:

Maybe I just happened to run into some exceptions, but I've had the feeling that over the past year the pace has slowed down.

opensource-development is a constant up and down as a developer never has a fixed schedule for his work. You might have a free week now and two busy months later. As a lot of people are involved sometimes you are lucky and "everyone" has time at the same time, at other times the lag between two people which are involved is large (living in different countries is one of the easier timeshifts) and easily adds up to a few weeks.

The other thing is that your perception is biased. You are interested in this or that package while the maintainer has a different package-interest at this particular point in time. Look at another package and its likely that you will see that the activity has increased over the last few years/months…

And as it is too obvious to not say it: Everything can be speed up by getting involved yourself.

_________________MfG. DonKult
"I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones." ~ The Doctor

CaesarTjalbo

Post subject: Re: Has Debian slowed down? Posted: 13.07.2011, 15:43

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DonKult wrote:

And as it is too obvious to not say it: Everything can be speed up by getting involved yourself.

I don't intend this as an argument pro or contra any change in speed for Debian development and as far as I'm concerned there are perfectly understandable reasons why this particular example went through that process. "Everything can be sped up by getting involved yourself" but keep your expectations low.

After squeeze came out and the freeze ended it took almost three months to get the new version of Digikam.

If Digikam upstream developers were not braindead and knew what release was, digikam could be updated on a more timely manner. Heck, even squeeze might have had a more recent version! Depending on a bunch of unreleased libraries is not the way to go despite big marketing push via blogs.

DeepDayze

Post subject: Re: Has Debian slowed down? Posted: 31.07.2011, 23:10

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MoDaX wrote:

hightime wrote:

After squeeze came out and the freeze ended it took almost three months to get the new version of Digikam.

If Digikam upstream developers were not braindead and knew what release was, digikam could be updated on a more timely manner. Heck, even squeeze might have had a more recent version! Depending on a bunch of unreleased libraries is not the way to go despite big marketing push via blogs.

So digikam was basically waiting on some libs yet to be released? Yes you are right in why should Debian wait for upstreams to release new libraries in that case.

MoDaX

Post subject: Re: Has Debian slowed down? Posted: 01.08.2011, 13:57

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DeepDayze wrote:

MoDaX wrote:

hightime wrote:

After squeeze came out and the freeze ended it took almost three months to get the new version of Digikam.

If Digikam upstream developers were not braindead and knew what release was, digikam could be updated on a more timely manner. Heck, even squeeze might have had a more recent version! Depending on a bunch of unreleased libraries is not the way to go despite big marketing push via blogs.

So digikam was basically waiting on some libs yet to be released? Yes you are right in why should Debian wait for upstreams to release new libraries in that case.

Digikam stable release (as upstream called it) depended on the kdegraphics libraries which were unreleased in kde svn trunk at that time. The same nonsense was repeated with 2.0.0. So upstream basically has no clue what release is and loathes at us when we tell him (politely) what he is doing wrong.

Digikam rant aside, I wanted to point out that it's not always distribution maintainer fault that packages are outdated. There are many factors involved including but not limited to uncooperative upstreams.